Adrift 2: Sundown (9 page)

When Herb had said that he lived on a ‘compound,’ Dan had pictured something militaristic: featureless buildings surrounded by an electrified fence, maybe; perhaps even some underground complex, the sort of place a villain in a
James Bond
movie might call home.

What he saw, when the chopper finally flew over what Herb called
our land
, was nothing like that. The Rennick compound was huge, buried deep in a thick forest that Herb said was protected green-belt land: no developer had been permitted to build on it for centuries; nor ever would. Dan hadn’t thought it was possible to find such a wilderness hidden in the crowded south of England.

The buildings themselves were even more of a surprise: Dan did see several modern-looking pre-fabricated structures, but they were all clustered around a spectacular mansion that had to be three hundred years old at least. As the helicopter swung around it, he thought the house looked more like a castle, or some vast museum: a huge, imposing stone structure liberally sprinkled with Gothic trimmings. Buttresses and delicate arches and sneering gargoyles that had been carved into the walls; they looked like they were leaping from the house, desperately trying to escape the clutches of the stone that birthed them.

Dan’s heart sank when he saw the place, not because of how oppressive and intimidating it appeared, but because, even from the air, he could tell immediately that it would be very difficult to escape from.

Once they were travelling over England, the familiarity of the landscape had allowed him to feel a spark of hope; of normality, and he had started to daydream about fleeing the moment the chopper set down. But even if he
could
somehow slip away from the watchful gaze of Herb and his followers, the compound looked
so
isolated. There had to be a road leading from the place somewhere but he couldn’t see it through the chopper’s narrow windows. All he could see was trees. If he was going to make a run for it, he would have to do so blindly; fleeing through unfamiliar countryside as night began to fall.

He didn’t know whether to believe Herb’s tale of a nest of vampires rising to avenge their dead at sunset or not, but the notion of finding some way to escape, only to end up stumbling around the forest, lost and alone in the gathering dark, made a shudder course through him.

Like it or not, with daylight fading quickly, the only way forward was to go into the house, but he had no intention of staying a minute longer than he had to. He told himself that at the first opportunity, he would slip away—presuming that neither Herb nor his strange band of followers decided to physically restrain him—and find a way to get home. It was all that mattered now: retreating to the apartment, taking his pills, praying that the medicine would somehow knit together the yawning chasms forming in his head before he lost his sanity entirely.

“Circle it again,” Jeremy barked suddenly. It was the first time the older man had spoken. During the helicopter ride, Dan thought Jeremy had looked increasingly agitated, and he had tried to avoid meeting his gaze as much as possible.

“What? Why?” Herb lifted his voice from the co-pilot’s seat.

“We need to know that it’s clear, Herb. We have more than enough time for that. It won’t be dark for at least an hour.”

Herb looked like he wanted to argue the point, but decided against it.

“Fine,” he said, staring at Jeremy quizzically. “Go around again, and then take us down.”

*

The chopper touched down on a small helipad set alongside a long, flat building which looked like an enormous garage, a hundred yards or so away from the main house. As the engine began to wind down, a pensive silence settled over the men gathered inside.

The Rennick compound looked deserted.

Dan watched as Herb dropped his eyes to his wrist.

“Almost three-thirty,” he said without emotion. “We have around seventy minutes until sundown. Maybe less.”

He squinted up at the gloomy sky.

Seventy minutes
, Dan thought bleakly. It was like there was a timer in everybody’s head, counting down toward the moment when darkness would arrive and bring the monsters. Yet despite that terrible ticking, nobody moved a muscle.

They all just sat in the helicopter, staring at the distant house.

Dan followed their gaze.

“What’s wrong?”

Herb scratched at his jaw, his expression thoughtful.

“What’s wrong is that there are around forty people in that house, and all of them should be pretty frantic about not hearing from us.”

“And?”

“And a helicopter just landed on their front lawn,” Herb said, “but I don’t see a single person at the windows.”

Dan studied the enormous main house. Herb was right: it was eerily quiet. The tension in the chopper became a bloated, terrible presence, and it suddenly struck him that the vehicle carried an exclusively male crew. Based on what Herb had told him about the make-up of the people who lived at the compound, at that very moment the others were all thinking about their wives and sisters and daughters and mothers.

All wondering.

And in the distance, through the rain and below the darkening afternoon sky, the mansion waited.

It was the smell which hit Herb first, the unmistakable odour that washed across him immediately as he pushed on the front door of the mansion, and it swung open easily.

Metallic, thick; hanging on the air like a threat.

The stink of blood.

Herb could almost taste it.

The rest of the group paused behind him. The smell was an invisible boundary: it worked on a genetic level, like the stench of so much human blood conveyed a simple biological message which triggered an automatic muscular response.

Stop
.

The mansion’s main reception area was huge, a cavernous space stretching back more than sixty feet to meet twin staircases at the back of the room which wound their way up to the east and west wings of the mansion.

At ground level, the walls of the reception room were lined with bookcases and display cabinets that stood below huge canvases in ornate frames. Several plush leather couches were dotted around the centre of the space, beneath a vast chandelier that caught the grey light diffusing through the windows and sparkled like a diamond.

The fragmented light it reflected illuminated a nightmare.

There was blood everywhere.

And in the centre of the room, directly beneath the chandelier, was a sight that made Herb’s blood run cold.

Bodies.

Tangled and torn, stacked chaotically in a gruesome pile; a dripping pyramid of death.

Somewhere behind him, Herb heard someone gasping in horror.

Someone else collapsing to the floor and emitting a low moan of despair.

And all he could do was stare at it.

It wasn’t a massacre; it was a
message
. It had to be. These people didn’t even look like they had been fed upon—just killed to erect the gruesome monument in the middle of the mansion.

This must be for me
, he thought.
For anyone who came back from the Oceanus.

Behind Herb, someone vomited loudly, and he snapped out of the daze that threatened to overwhelm him.

“They’ve been here,” he said softly, his voice laced with wonder, “they’re on the surface already. How is that possible? How could they have known about the Oceanus before dawn?”

“They could
still
be here,” a gravelly voice hissed, and Herb turned to see Jeremy, hanging several yards back from the doorway and taking slow steps backwards toward the distant chopper. He was the only one among them—aside from Dan—who couldn’t fly the helicopter, but judging by the look on his face, he wanted to learn
fast
.

Herb shook his head and pointed at a large panel on the wall just inside the doorway. Inside it, a range of switches controlled the mansion’s steel shutters, and UV floodlights which covered the grounds entirely for several hundred yards.

“The shutters aren’t down. If they were in here, why wouldn’t they block out the light?”

“Uh, gee, I don’t know. Maybe because they’re monsters who don’t understand your damn alarm system?” Dan said.

Herb glanced at him, and Dan clamped his lips shut and looked away abruptly.

“Maybe not,” Herb replied. “But the people living here did, and as soon as the vampires took one of their minds, they’d understand it just fine. That’s the way these things are supposed to work, isn’t it, Jeremy?”

Herb lifted his voice a little.

“They take us, and they know what we know, right?”

The group flinched as Herb raised his voice further still. He paused and listened intently. There was no sound from the interior of the house; nothing at all.

“Unless the texts got
that
part wrong, too.”

Herb watched Jeremy carefully. Something had been off about the older man on the trawler, and now his behaviour was even stranger. He had spent the helicopter ride sitting behind Herb in tense silence, refusing to engage in any discussion.

Now that Herb came to think about it, what Jeremy had looked, back on the chopper, was
scared.
Almost like he knew they were heading straight for a bad place.

Jeremy continued to back away slowly, his eyes fixed on the doorway, a look of horror on his face. A couple of the clerics began to follow him, and then stopped when they noticed Herb standing firm.

“We need to get out of here, Herb,” he said, shaking his head.

“And go where? It will be dark in a little over an hour—”

“Anywhere,” Jeremy snarled. “You can’t seriously be considering going in there.”

Herb returned his gaze to the reception room, trying not to focus on the monstrosity at its centre. The room was brightly lit by the huge windows, just as the rest of the house would be. He couldn’t imagine the vampires staying in a place like that, not unless they were hiding in cupboards.

Indecision tore through him. His father owned an apartment in London that was rarely used, but it boasted few of the defensive capabilities that the mansion would once it was locked down. The apartment had been fitted with the same steel shutters as the buildings on the compound, but it lacked UV lights and, more importantly, thick stone walls.

Beyond the apartment in the city, he couldn’t think where else he could possibly go. Fleeing blindly into the coming night without a safe destination would be asking for trouble.

“Anybody here?”

Herb yelled the words almost without realising he was doing it; bellowing them into the echoing silence of the mansion. He had to do
something
. The uncertainty was killing him.

He strained his ears to catch some response; any sound which might indicate that there was a presence in the house.

Nothing.

He turned to the group.

Opened his mouth with no clear idea how he was going to tell them that he thought they should go inside.

He didn’t get the chance.

Somewhere behind him, a woman’s voice broke the silence inside the mansion.

Crying.

Calling for help.

Dan heard the woman crying, but he no longer saw the vast reception room spread out before him, or the grisly mountain of bodies.

Instead, he saw the face of the woman he loved, lit in the ghostly green of nightvision goggles. Her eyes wide and terrified as the talons hooked under her jaw and began to pull—

And then suddenly he was running forward on autopilot, following the sound of pitiful crying blindly, and his mind felt like it was short-circuiting, neurons igniting in all directions; a fireworks display in his skull.

He ran without looking back, without waiting to see if the others would follow.

He had forgotten they were even there.

He turned left into a large dining room, and the sound of the crying got louder.

He ran.

And the black river crashed over him.

*

For a moment, the only thing Herb could do was stare in amazement as Dan Bellamy bolted, tearing through the reception room without even pausing to glance at the pile of corpses, following the woman’s scream for help.

Dan had already veered to the left, and out of his sight, through an archway that led to the main dining room, before Herb managed to persuade his own feet that they should follow.

He pulled out the two guns he had acquired on the trawler, wondering what good they would do him if he was actually required to use them, snarled at the others to follow, and chased after Dan. When he glanced back, he saw that they were all terrified, but all were following—with the exception of Jeremy. It looked like the older man hadn’t even entered the mansion.

Herb hadn’t picked him for a coward.

He reached the entrance to the dining room just as Dan disappeared through a doorway at the far end, running like his life depended on it. In the distance, Herb heard the crying get a little louder. The survivor—whoever she was—had to be in the main part of the kitchen. Herb led the group at a sprint, his heart hammering, following Dan through the doorway.

He slammed to a halt.

Bellamy was standing a few feet in front of him, shaking his head and blinking slowly, as though he had just woken from a deep sleep. Beyond him, sitting on the island in the centre of the huge steel-and-stone kitchen, Herb saw the survivor.

Her name was Zoe, he remembered. Zoe Yates. Her family had married into the Order generations ago. She was a few years older than Herb and, when he was a teenager, he’d developed a fearsome crush on her which had lasted for an excruciating couple of months.

Despite that, it took him a moment to place her exactly.

With all the blood.

Zoe sat on the island alongside a knife rack, clutching a blade in each hand.

Sawing.

Slowly cutting her own legs off.

For a moment, Herb’s thoughts drained away, his mind unable to cope with the horror his eyes served up. He stared at Zoe’s face, and crawling dread made his throat constrict. In her eyes, he saw a terrible awareness. She knew exactly what she was doing, he realised; she could feel every furrow that her hands were carving into her own flesh.

She just can’t stop it.

Herb’s jaw dropped.

And his mind snapped into action.

“There’s still one here,” he snarled, his muscles tensing involuntarily, preparing for the attack he was certain was incoming.

Before anyone could react, the house began to rumble around them, and the steel shutters started to close.

Someone had activated the lockdown.

No. Some
thing.

It was under the bodies
, Herb thought in dull terror.
Playing a damn game with us. We walked right past it.

The light began to fade as the shutters rolled down.

It’s sealing us inside.

In the dark.

His eyes widened
.
“Turn on the lights,” he roared, and he ran from the kitchen back out into the corridor that connected to the dining room, flicking on the light just as the shutters closed, plunging the rest of the mansion into darkness.

Herb threw himself back into the kitchen and slammed the door behind him, locking it with an ancient iron key that had almost rusted into the lock, and flicked the nearest light switch on. With a faint buzz, fluorescent strips hummed into life overhead, flooding the centre of the kitchen with cold, white light.

The kitchen comprised several smaller rooms, and when Herb jabbed a finger at them, the stunned clerics fanned out quickly and lit the whole place up. There were two other doors into the kitchen: one leading down to the extensive wine cellar, and another that opened onto a narrow service stairwell which led up to a first-floor lounge and bar area.

He dragged a table across the door, jamming it into the wood, praying that it would hold, and motioned at the clerics to lock the remaining two doors. Outside, he heard the faint smashing of glass and knew immediately that the vampire had taken out the lights that he had just turned on in the corridor. The kitchen was an oasis of light in the mansion.

All exits and windows locked down, a vampire at the door.

No way out.

“It’s okay,” Herb said in a voice that came out high-pitched and tremulous. “It can’t get in.”

As if in response, the vampire charged at the door, impacting on it with a thunderous crash. Herb saw the table that he had used for a barricade wobble a little, and realised that if he didn’t believe in his own words, he couldn’t expect anyone else to, either.

“It can’t get in,” he repeated firmly.

Outside the heavy kitchen door, there was only silence. The vampire had charged it once, testing its strength, but now…

What the hell is it doing now?

Herb’s heart hammered painfully, and he picked up the two handguns once more, and set them down again on a counter almost immediately. They weren’t the weapons he needed. Where the hell
was
the weapon he needed?

He scanned the kitchen. Dan Bellamy had collapsed to his knees in a large walk-in pantry, and was gasping for air, with his hands gripping the sides of his skull. He looked like he was about to have another seizure, or perhaps even a heart attack.

Edgar was wrong about him.

Suddenly, the unmistakeable truth rolled out in front of Herb, and he saw it clearly. Even if Dan Bellamy was somehow special, it didn’t matter. The guy couldn’t actually
fight
the vampires. He was terrified and broken. Weak. His survival on the Oceanus had been a fluke, and Bellamy was coming apart at the seams because of it. So what if they couldn’t take his mind? They would just tear apart his body while he cowered and whimpered.

Herb felt like a lawyer who’d built an entire defence on a gross miscalculation, and only realised his error when the judge began to laugh in his face. He had followed his heart, determined to do
something
, to fight back somehow—and his determination to act on impulse would end up killing them all.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and saw his father’s face, twisted into a sardonic grin.

Who’ll be the head of the Rennick family?

You?

Dan gurgled and choked, gasping for breath like he was drowning, and despair washed over Herb. He turned away.

Just in time to see Zoe throw herself from the kitchen island and drive a knife deep into the chest of the nearest cleric. Stephen gasped as the blade lodged between his ribs, and he staggered forward a couple of steps, passing Zoe on like a virus. She hurled herself off him and drove the other knife into Christian’s neck, sending an arterial spurt across two other clerics before anybody could move.

When Christian crashed, gurgling, to the floor, Zoe went down with him as the legs that she had mutilated beyond comprehension buckled beneath her. She barely seemed to notice the fall. Upon landing, she instantly shot out a blood-soaked hand like a striking viper, plucking the knife from Christian’s neck. It came free, and the blood came with it; a crimson fountain that finally put an end to the cleric’s ragged panting.

Zoe began to drag herself toward the others, smearing a trail of gore across the tiles behind her. With every staccato lurch forward, she swung the knife with her left hand, each wide arc spraying thick crimson droplets across the room.

The attack took only seconds, and the sudden savagery of it rooted Herb to the spot. He watched in dumb fascination as the clerics retreated from the swinging blade, shrieking in terror. Only when one of them unlocked the door to the wine cellar, and they began to flee from the kitchen, did Herb finally snap out of his stupor.

“No!” he yelled, and he sprinted around Zoe, hurdling over the blade that she swung in his direction.

Already, two of the clerics had fled from the room, blind panic setting in and making them lose their minds. A third—Scott—was halfway through the door when Herb grabbed his shirt and pulled him back into the kitchen.

He slammed the door shut and locked it.

“That’s what it wants,” Herb snarled at the cleric, and he turned to face Zoe.

She was only feet away.

Still coming; still clutching the knife.

Still
crying
.

Herb wanted more than anything to turn and flee from the hideous sight, but he grimaced and darted forward, skipping around the knife and stooping to catch her arm. His fingers closed on her wrist and he twisted it violently. The knife fell to the tiles with a metallic clatter, but Herb didn’t even hear it landing.

His entire focus was taken up by Zoe’s eyes: wide and pleading, so terribly
aware
.

She’s still in there somewhere
, he thought, and felt a scream gathering in his lungs.
She’s living every second of it
.

He pushed Zoe away and rose to his feet, taking a step backwards and kicking the knife away from her grasping fingers.

Zoe’s eyes dropped to her hands in despair, and she whimpered as they began to drag her back toward the distant knife rack.

She won’t stop
, Herb thought.
It won’t let her. It will use her until she is dead…or we are.

Zoe’s commandeered body was reaching up, straining for the knife rack on the kitchen island when Herb picked up one of the guns he had left on the counter and put a bullet in the back of her head, slamming her into the floor.

Doing what was necessary.

Just like Dad.

Herb gritted his teeth, and shook away the grinning image of his father.

At his feet, Zoe’s body was motionless at last, her eyes fixed and empty.

And as the echoing blast of the gun in the enclosed kitchen faded, and Herb tried to process the insanity of what she had been forced to do—what
he
had been forced to do—the vampire outside the kitchen door began to
chuckle
.

The sound coiled around Herb’s nerves like razor wire, but even as his instincts howled at him, his mind was calling his attention to something else. A very important detail. The rest of the house remained quiet. The two clerics that had fled through the wine cellar in a panic hadn’t even started to scream. Not yet.

Because it has been busy with us.

There’s only one here
, he thought.

Could it be that there
was
only one more vampire? According to the texts, the English nest was small, but was thought to number in the dozens.

Maybe that was a lie, too.

It made sense, didn’t it? That the creatures who had decided to erase their existence from human history might exaggerate their own strength? They weren’t immortal, that was for sure.

Herb frowned, and in the distance, he began to hear the shrieking of the two clerics, exactly as he had known he would. A flurry of terrified yells which cut off abruptly, until there was only one voice left.

And his screams were long, and slow.

Herb tried to tune out the horror of the noise and
think
.

One vampire.

If there are more out there, where the hell are they?